[Spectator@chinomnso]

In SEO, speed is important. You may publish a similar news story on your website just about the same time with others, or even earlier, and they may get indexed before yours and even rank higher than yours. This article gives a number of tips to help you rank faster in search results. Without much ado, let’s dive right in.

Use Google’s URL Inspection Tool

Getting your site indexed on Google is not so big a problem. The challenge is getting indexed fast. Google offers a number of good tools, the simplest and fastest most likely being the URL Inspection tool available in Google Search Console. Google’s URL Inspection tool allows you to submit a URL and ask Google to crawl it. When you do that, Google puts it in a priority crawl queue. This means that it will be crawled and indexed faster than others on the queue.

Use Sitemaps

Make sure you’re using sitemaps. Not using sitemaps is an SEO pitfall into which many webmasters have fallen. However, it is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get your URLs indexed. Having your URLs in a sitemap tells Google that they actually exist.

One of the simplest things you can do is to refer to your sitemaps from inside your robots.txt file. Right in your robots.txt file, you can point to your sitemaps(s) by adding a few lines before or after your regular robots.txt directives like this:

User-agent: *
Allow: /blog/
Allow: /products/

Disallow: /dashboard/
Disallow: /admin/

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

A great way of telling Google of your sitemaps is to ping Google. Although a lot of people may not know about this, it is not rocket science. You don’t need a special setup, and you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing special software. Using the format below, insert the full URL to your sitemap and ping Google.

https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Google Indexing API

Not too long ago, both Google and Bing introduced APIs to help speed up and automate the processes involved in crawling and indexing of URLs. Their solutions hold a promise of huge potential for substantially increasing the speed of indexing URLs by submitting hundreds or thousands of URLs by means of an API.

Bing’s API is designed for new and updated URLs, while Googles’ API, according to them, is for “either job posting or livestream structured data”. Although Google’s API seems restricted to just two content types, some SEO experts have experimented with it and found it to work with other content types.

Link From Important Pages

When you publish new content on your website, it is a good idea to put links to the new content inside important pages on your website. An example of an important page is your homepage. Therefore, if you have a blog, it is a good idea to have the latest articles show up on your homepage.

When you add links to important pages on your website, you’re telling Google two things at the same time: first, you’re telling Google to craw the link; second, you’re telling Google that the link is more important because you’re linking to it from important pages.

Update Old Content On Your Website

One simple technique that is often overlooked by webmasters is updating old content. We just talked about adding links of new content to important pages. Adding those links to relevant content that is now old is a good way to make old content fresh again.

Use Content Aggregators

Using content aggregators to share your links can provide a real boost for your site’s crawling, indexing and ranking. Use content aggregators like Pinterest and Reddit, as it has been discovered that there is a strong connection between shares and content ranking.

Google can pick up on social media and content aggregator signals and perceive the sharing activity. When Google goes crawling those websites, the spiders come across your links. Having your links crawled from another site works pretty much the same way as having your links crawled from within your website, except that it is somewhat better because it is an external link. And it is even better if the site has a higher ranking or page authority than yours.

This is certainly not a definitive list of tips to rank your content faster. So, if you have others that I’ve not included here, feel free to share them.

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